They'll should still have plenty of time for taking photos. Astronauts usually work a regular 8-ish hour work day up in the ISS and have weekends etc...
2 of those working hours each day are blocked out for exercise, too, so this should be a real boon.
They work 8 hours a day including exercise? That seems bizarre to me. I know we don't want them burning out, etc., but if we're sending astronauts up there at great expense I'd think we'd want to ask them to put in a little more than 8 hour days.
16 hours a day plus weekends seems like a ridiculous amount of free time given that there's no commuting, family time (other than calls), yard work, social engagements, etc.
> In the 19th century, when organized labor first compelled factory owners to limit workdays to 10 (and then eight) hours, management was surprised to discover that output actually increased – and that expensive mistakes and accidents decreased. This is an experiment that Harvard Business School’s Leslie Perlow and Jessica Porter repeated over a century later with knowledge workers. It still held true. Predictable, required time off (like nights and weekends) actually made teams of consultants more productive.
The mistakes/accidents bit is especially compelling when talking about a $100 billion spacecraft.
Startup culture would do well to learn from this lesson.
Bear in mind that in space exercise is mandatory, because the lack of it considerably reduces the time a given person can spend there, which in turn would require more frequent launches, which are expensive.
Also - they're the best of the best. They sort of earned the privilege of not doing overtime.
I think you might be grossly underestimating the psychological impact of spending 6 months inside a place the size of an apartment with no day or night cycle, a constant feeling of weightlessness, and no ability to go outside or feel things like wind or rain.
They're stuck inside there anyways. If it were me, I suspect I'd prefer to stay occupied. I'm not saying we should work them to the bone, but 16 hours a day plus weekends just seems like a lot of time to fill when there's limited options anyways.
BTW, I'm being down-voted above for expressing surprise at the claim the crew only works 8 hours daily including 2 hours exercise. But the example crew day shown in the following link suggests (by my reading) that it's more like 11 hours (7:30-7:30 with an hour of lunch):
I don't think they actually work just eight hours a day. There's a lot of maintenance work to do and it's not like there are many things to do on your free time. Although now that there's the full six-person crew, the schedules are probably less tight.
I guess it also depends on what constitutes "work". The station is their home as well as workplace, after all. And when your home is an aluminum can in a vacuum, there's quite a bit of housework to do. Also, these are six-month missions, unlike week-or-two-long Shuttle flights which naturally had a tighter schedule.
2 of those working hours each day are blocked out for exercise, too, so this should be a real boon.